Scope of Scientonomy - Acceptance Use and Pursuit

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{{Topic |Question=How ought a scientonomic theory deal with the various stances that a community might take towards a theory? Which stances towards a theory ought a scientonomic theory account for? |Topic Type=Normative |Description=Communities may take several epistemic stances towards theories. Theories can be accepted by a community as the best currently available description of the world. Even when they are not so accepted, they can be deemed instrumentally useful for certain problems. They can be deemed promising and worthy of pursuit. The question at issue here is that of which of these stances need a scientonomic theory account for. Ought it account only for accepted theories, or ought it also account for scientists decisions to pursue theories as worthy of further development, or their decisions to treat theories as instrumentally useful? |Parent Topic=Scope of Scientonomy |Authors List=Hakob Barseghyan, |Formulated Year=2015 |Prehistory=There has been a long tradition of confusing different stances that a community can take towards a theory. Thomas Kuhn, for example, used a number of equally vague words, including universally received, embraced, acknowledged, and committed to describe the status of theories within scientific communities. Kuhn's theory of scientific change regarded the units of scientific change to be frameworks that he referred to as paradigms 1, a term which he himself later confessed he had used in several different senses. 2pp.293-319 He clarified his theory by introducing the concept of disciplinary matricies, defined as those shared elements that account for the relatively unproblematic professional communication and relative unanimity of professional judgment within a scientific community. These include shared symbolic generalizations, models, and exemplars [[CiteRef::Kuhn (1977)

Until a proper taxonomy of epistemic stances towards theories was formulated the question at issue could not be clearly framed |Related Topics=Scope of Scientonomy - Construction and Appraisal, Scope of Scientonomy - Descriptive and Normative, Scope of Scientonomy - Explicit and Implicit, Scope of Scientonomy - Individual and Social, Scope of Scientonomy - Time Fields and Scale, Epistemic Stances Towards Theories, |Page Status=Needs Editing }}

References

  1. ^ Kuhn (1962) 
  2. ^ Kuhn(1977)